Comedian DeAnne Smith has performed her standup act around the U.S. and Canada as well as the U.K. and Australia, but one thing she’s never done is a hometown show — until now.

The Endicott native and Union-Endicott grad will bring her brand of upbeat adult comedy to Touch of Texas in Binghamton next Thursday (Dec. 14).

The booking happened almost by accident, when Jerry Silvanic of Comedy King (which is presenting the show along with the newly formed 7 Mile Bridge Entertainment Group) reached out to her but didn’t realize she has local roots.

“He just said, ‘Would you ever be around Binghamton and be interested in performing?’ I said, ‘Absolutely! I come there at least a few times a year because I’m from Endicott,’” Smith said in an interview last week from Toronto, where she now lives. “It was really serendipitous when that happened. I’m really excited about it — it’s going to be a lot of fun.”

Smith has appeared on “Last Comic Standing,” “Funny as Hell” and “The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson,” she’s been nominated for awards (including the Melbourne Comedy Festival's prestigious Barry Award in 2011), and she’s consistently ranked among the Top 10 comedians in Montreal (where she resided for a decade until a recent move).

She credits her upbringing in Crestview Heights during the 1980s and 1990s for inspiring her to be funny, but those years also were “really idyllic.”

“I definitely grew up in a household where jokes were appreciated and humor was appreciated, so that was fostered in me since I was a kid,” Smith said.

“It was a great childhood — the kind of thing you don’t see much anymore, and certainly not in cities where I’ve lived since, where you’re running around with the neighborhood kids and going home when your mom opens the front door and yells that it’s time for dinner. We spent so much of our time outdoors in the woods and running around that it was very fun.”

After U-E, Smith attended Alfred University and later worked as a street outreach advocate in Baltimore. She spent most of her 20s in Mexico teaching English — “before I had much direction in my life,” she admitted.

Montreal is where she found her true calling. While attending college for a master’s degree in creative writing, she intended to be a poet — but in early 2006, she did her first standup comedy set at an open-mic night.

Needless to say, she loved it: “I had a goal and a purpose, and everything else just fell into place.”

Poetry and comedy wouldn’t seem to have a lot in common — except maybe Shel Silverstein and naughty limericks — but Smith definitely found some transferrable skills.

“Both can be about evocative imagery and economy of language — you want to get to a punchline really quickly and you want people to know what you’re taking about,” she said.

“When I started doing standup, I was still doing poetry readings, and it became so clear to me that if I have people’s attention in a room, I’d rather make them laugh than feel quietly reflective. Standup is so much more of an immediate gratification, and it’s very clear whether or not you’re doing your job — painfully clear sometimes.”

Smith’s onstage persona — preppy wardrobe, bowties and asymmetrical haircut — has a “cheerful ‘kid sister’ vibe” that never wavers even as she delves into frank talk about gender and sexuality. She describes herself as agender, “not strongly identifying with being a woman or a man,” but definitely with an eye for the ladies.

Still, it’s the relationships between people — gay, straight or somewhere in between — that offer the best comedy.

“We’re all more alike than we are different regardless of the details around something, like someone’s gender or sexual orientation,” she said. “What’s funny to people is what’s relatable, and that’s our shared human experience.

“Also, I don’t mind being the people who’s different from everybody else in the room. I’ve always been ‘out’ onstage, and it wasn’t even really a conscious choice — it’s just who I am — but having done that, I see that it’s important to do because some people don’t have those types of voices in their lives, and they can have exposure to something a little bit different.”

And although she never intended to be a role model or inspiration, she’s received praise for just that as her popularity has grown.

“I have parents coming up to me and I have teenagers coming up to me saying it’s important to see that kind of positive representation,” she said. “That isn’t something I thought about when I started talking about it — I’m just always true to myself — but seeing that it’s important to other people makes me want to keep being true to myself and keep being a voice of similarity or of difference, as long as it’s honest.”

Smith’s standup act doesn’t veer toward the political, but she recently toured Australia with a show called the “Post-Joke Era,” and she understands how recent divisions in our society at large make humor more important.

“Now more than ever, it’s a valuable experience for people to come out, take a night off, laugh and — this is going to sound a little cheesy, but have this shared experience of positivity and happiness and joy,” she said.

“One of my favorite things to experience when I’m watching comedy and hopefully create when I’m doing comedy, there’s this thing — I don’t know why it happens, but you hear a joke that so funny to you and you actually have to look around and make eye contact with other people in that ‘hey, did you hear that?’ kind of way. I think that comedy can bring people together.”

Although Smith is definitely looking forward to performing in Binghamton, one thing does cause some concern.

“I’m a little bit nervous that my dad is going to be in the audience,” she said with a laugh. “He has a great sense of humor and is always joking around, but I’m a little bit rude onstage, and not everything I say onstage I would just say to my dad. That’s going to be interesting. I hope he doesn’t invite too many church friends!”